I think that picking isolated websites (gmail or medium) isn't enough to get a sense of what the average user's expectation is. These two particular examples aren't necessarily the best for other reasons: Google products and Gmail in particular have always had very engineer-minded keyboard shortcuts because engineers rule the culture at Google. That's not necessarily the best thing for accessibility if you don't have that culture. As for Medium, it's too new to have proven itself as something with good accessibility. Maybe a lot of people are getting confused by medium's interface, we wouldn't know.
I suspect that the reason why this keep coming up is that we're overriding a key that normally provides core browser functionality. Also, anyone who happens to have the opposite mental model than the one we cater for, either through their experience of the web, of their use of tablets, etc. will have a very hard time training themselves to remember to "do it right" in Media Viewer. It goes against their intuition and even if we visually inform them that they're "doing it wrong", they have to learn to use the tool, which is bad. Something like Media Viewer should be intuitive for everyone. Even if we pick the option that works for the majority, there will still be a non-trivial amount of users for whom the up/down arrow behavior will feel counter-intuitive. And every time it doesn't do what they expect, they get a little more annoyed at the product.
In my opinion, we should stick to only creating keyboard shortcuts that use keys that aren't overriding browser mechanics. We can keep right and left arrow because we know that Media Viewer never has horizontal scrollbars, but for opening/closing the metadata panel I think we should use something else like "M" that would both open and close the panel. And keyboard shortcuts can be documented on Media Viewer's help page, and could also be displayed in the UI (when hovering the clickable equivalent, for example).
We can even add a bunch, for example a shortcut to download the original file (D?), to view the full size (V?), go to the file page (F?), etc. We can internationalize them as well if we want to. That might actually help with the power users complaints that some things now require multiple clicks in Media Viewer that didn't use to on the file page. Give them keyboard shortcuts to save clicks and it might make a subset of them happy. And if we stick to plain letters with no modifiers for those shortcuts, we shouldn't run into any browser functionality conflict (since plain letter presses are normally left undisturbed so that html inputs can receive them).
On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 8:12 AM, Gergo Tisza gtisza@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 7:55 PM, Pau Giner pginer@wikimedia.org wrote:
What exactly should that snippet do?
When the panel is closed and the user presses either "up" or "down" keys, open the panel.
var oldLoadViewer = mw.mmv.bootstrap.loadViewer; mw.mmv.bootstrap.loadViewer = function() { return oldLoadViewer.apply( this, arguments ).done( function() { mw.mmv.bootstrap.viewer.ui.panel.scroller.keydown = function() { mw.mmv.bootstrap.viewer.ui.panel.scroller.toggle(); }; } ); };
This makes both the up and down keys toggle open/closed state.
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